Recently, the whole “Nice Guy” topic came up again, well after the initial post had become a thing of legend. Many people jumped in on the new discussion, but it always seems like the same people respond in the same way. The phrase, “Yes, they’re being jerks, but they’ve got a point…” keeps getting bandied about in these conversations, with one user posting an old joke about the supposed underlying truth behind the complaints that Nice Guys have. As I am not yet an accomplished disembowler of bad ideas, I thought I might take a practice run at this one…anyone else want to join me behind the cut?

Q: How many “Let’s Just be Friends” does it take to change a light bulb?

And right here, we have the basic and fundamental problem the Nice Guy has, stated right up there at the beginning so that we can get it out of the way quickly. “Let’s Just Be Friends”, in ironic quotemarks so that we all understand that it’s obviously BS. This woman isn’t “just” a “friend”! They’re a woman, and therefore a potential sexual partner! The whole idea that a man and a woman can somehow have interactions between each other that don’t lead to sex is absurd on the face of it; relationships between members of the opposite sex can only have two phases. Courtship, and screwing. If the woman is still on speaking terms with you, they must therefore understand that you are courting them by definition; continuing to have voluntary social interaction with you is just “stringing you along.” Sure, they might say that they’re just a friend of yours; sure, they might say that the relationship is strictly platonic; sure, they might say that they’re not interested in you sexually and you are just like a brother to them! But the Nice Guy knows that this is just playing “hard-to-get”.

A: Only one, who will…

… call you up every night for three months and talk to you for hours on end, about how bad her current light bulb is, how it goes out without warning, and never provides her with the kind of light she would really love to have.

This one comes up time and time again, in every one of these Nice Guy rants. Again, do women ever really do this? Ever? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it does always seem like the sort of thing that people like this talk about as examples of how much support they provide to “women”, when it sounds more like the sort of thing that guys who’ve never actually spoken to a woman but have seen lots of Julia Roberts movies might come up with as an example. Most of the women I know wouldn’t go three months in a relationship with someone who treats them badly to the point where they call up their friends to complain about them every single night, but maybe I don’t know the right people.

Either way, though, the implication is loud and clear; because you provided this woman with emotional support, she is obliged to respond with sex in order to even the score. Setting aside the obvious problem (if you only provided them with emotional support to get some sex out of them, you’re really not much of a friend, are you? I do nice things for my friends because I like them, not because I’m banking up favors for later…) Why is it that Nice Guys assume that emotional support should always be repaid with physical affection? If she’s been calling you every night for three months to unload her troubles on you, and then blows you off when you’re feeling bad because she’s got better things to do than listen to you mope, then it’s an issue. Then the friendship is one-sided. But if you listen to them, all you can realistically expect is that they should listen to you.

… tell you what a wonderful light bulb you have, and how any woman would die to have such a light bulb.

…and it’s about here that “light bulb” formally becomes a euphemism for “penis”. Guys, I have news for you. Despite the vital evidence provided by that classic documentary series, “Sex and the City”, women do not have a grapevine of dating info that ranks men according to their penis size and prioritizes their relationships accordingly. If a woman is not into you, and you’re insecure about your penis size, these things are not necessarily related anywhere but in your own head.

Other than that, this is primarily a social skills issue; Nice Guys generally don’t interact with other people enough to know that whenever someone says, “Oh, you’re a wonderful person, I’m sure there’s someone out there for you, lots of women/men would love to have a boyfriend/girlfriend like you,” they’re just saying it to be nice and both parties know it. It may actually be true, but it’s not meant to be taken in the same way as, “The train for London leaves at 6 PM.” It is reassurance, not prediction.

… tell you it’s amazing that your light bulb has been sitting alone in it’s little corrugated cardboard tube for the last six months and even more amazing that you don’t have a dozen sockets to screw it into.

…

…..

…….um, dudes everywhere? If you’re trying to convince people that you don’t have a simmering undercurrent of misogyny beneath your attempts to laugh your frustrations about dating off with jokes, don’t refer to women as “sockets”. It’s just not going to go well. Trust me.

(Also, if you’ve been living in a corrugated cardboard tube for six months, your dating prospects will go down. Try looking into government assistance and local shelters.)

… call you up at three o’clock on a Monday morning, (destroying any chance you had of being alert, much less coherent at that crucial business meeting at 8 am) to agonize about the fight she had with her light bulb, and to tell you that she finally lost her temper with it and unscrewed the light bulb forever.

Again, note that her relying on you for emotional support is considered to be grounds for getting tail, not for getting emotional support. If you call her up at three o’clock on a Monday morning, distraught over a breakup, and her response is, “Unnnn…tell you what, why don’t you just take a couple of sleeping pills to get through the night and we’ll talk about this later, okay?” Then you have grounds to be upset. If she doesn’t promptly agree with sex to you out of a misplaced guilt reaction, you do not have grounds to be upset. See how it works?

… be shocked at your offer of a replacement bulb, and will tell you that she could never screw your light bulb into her empty socket, that doing so would ruin the light it gives out, and that it’s too good a bulb for her anyway, but that she hopes she’ll still be able to come over and talk to you about her light bulb problems.

And again, this makes perfect sense if you start from the premise that women are automatically being disengenuous when they tell you that they don’t see you as a romantic partner. If you assume that every time a woman says, “No, I see you as a friend,” they’re really just stringing you along romantically, then of course it hurts when you finally make your romantic interests known and she says that she sees you as a friend! Because you know she’s lying! Just like she’s lied every time she talked to you! The fact that she showed interest in you as a human being must mean that either she’s after sex herself, or she knows that you’re after sex and wants to get other things out of you by pandering to your interest in sex! And she turned you down for sex so SHE MUST BE A LYING TWO-FACED GOLDDIGGER OMG SHE’S JUST LIKE ALL THE REST

Let me break it to you gently but firmly, Nice Guys. If a woman tells you she sees you as a friend, and you don’t believe her, it is not her fault when you get upset. She is not lying, she is not pretending that the relationship is anything other than what it is, and she is not stringing you along. She is your friend. Everything else going on is baggage you are bringing to the friendship, and being upset at people for not living up to promises you imagined they made is the sign of a crazy person.

Or to put it another way, if you had a male friend that helped you move, that hung out with you and watched sports, that commiserated with you after break-ups and congratulated you on promotions…and they then explained a couple of years down the line that they did it all because they were gay and were really picturing their cock in your mouth the whole time…would you feel obligated to have sex with them? And if you did turn them down for sex, do you think they’d be justified in getting furiously angry with you for “stringing them along” and “using them for emotional intimacy”?

… go home, rummage through the trash can, find the defunct light bulb, lovingly clean it off, screw it back into the socket, and sit there in the dark.

… call you up every night for three months…

Because of course, the proper emotional response to a friend who’s trapped in an abusive relationship is a sense of irritation that they aren’t giving you sex! That’s how you know that you’re their friend, because your first thought when they’re in trouble is about yourself and how their problems inconvenience you.

It’s very simple. If a woman acts like they’re your friend, says they’re your friend, and behave like they’re your friend…then they’re your friend. This doesn’t mean you can’t want more, but their emotional consistency is not a personal slight against you. Suck it up, deal with it…and that doesn’t mean stop being their friend. What nine out of ten Nice Guys need is a female friend that they know they have no chance with, just so they can figure out that it’s not the end of the world if you hang out with a woman just because you enjoy each other’s company and not as some sort of secretive platonic dating gambit.* It helps you treat women like actual people instead of orifices-in-waiting, which women tend to look for in a man, and it helps your social skills, ditto, and it also helps you figure out exactly what the real signs of “I am interested in you” are, so you can pick up on a hint when a woman actually drops one. And if you can’t enjoy the company of a woman in any context other than sex, and you really don’t understand how to deal with a woman as anything other than an object to be fucked…then you’re one of the other ten percent. Get mental help. For your own sake as much as everyone else’s.

I hope this clarifies things.

*The phrase “secretive platonic dating” is copyright and trademark Melora Creager, of the band Rasputina. All rights reserved.

Light bulb is clearly a euphamism for guy throughout. “what a wonderful light bulb you have” = “what a wonderful guy you are. After all, if said “nice guy” is just a friend with the woman in this joke then how would she have any info on penis size?

“Because of course, the proper emotional response to a friend who’s trapped in an abusive relationship is a sense of irritation that they aren’t giving you sex! That’s how you know that you’re their friend, because your first thought when they’re in trouble is about yourself and how their problems inconvenience you.”

considering the fact that the joke includes her throwing away the relationship she’s in, why would someone, especially an emotionally stunted someone as we’re figuring these “nice guys” are, assume she’s trapped?

You know, I almost entirely agree with this post, but I still have to bring something up.

In the anime Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, there is a sequence where one character states that friends should not have secrets from each other, and everyone basically agrees. I’m not sure this qualifies as a spoiler – if you’ve seen the first four episodes of the anime, you can predict how this will go – but it eventually turns out that, surprise, they had secret and so that character starts murdering people out of sheer paranoia.

It is established later on that yes, of course, friends can have secrets from each other because while that saying sounded good, it was blatant nonsense.

To bring this rambling detour to a point, I feel the same about this sequence.

if you only provided them with emotional support to get some sex out of them, you’re really not much of a friend, are you? I do nice things for my friends because I like them, not because I’m banking up favors for later

I fundamentally agree with that as well, but I feel it underplays the fact that friendships are necessarily based on reciprocity; and while some people remain loyal to others despite the fact that they are no longer capable of responding in kind, or even acknowledging that sacrifice, this is a massive exception and the standard is that friendships that lose reciprocity quickly deteriorate.

Friendship in exchange for sex sounds bad, and is somewhat iffy, but it’s not hugely different from the way that relationships actually work. Certainly there’s no obligation here, but it’s not completely crazy to propose this type of situation either.

@FreepingCreature: Yes, which is why he says several times that if your friend won’t listen to you at 3 AM in the morning like you do for them, then you have a problem. He addresses your concern about reciprocity.

I don’t like talking about my relationship history online because it just encourages the worst sort of Nice Guy. I am convinced that Nice Guys are effectively cross-gender sociopaths and nothing will ever get them to change. They’ll just continue their nefarious planning and cargo-cult feigned concern, and keep wondering why neither ever get them laid, never understanding that determining their interactions with women in terms of what will get them laid is the entire problem.

I’ve been on the receiving end of Nice Guyism (Being a guy, but also gay), and I can assure other guys that it is creepy as hell.

Someone I know and like as a friend, who I like chatting with, and do the whole “here are my problems” “Let me help with yours” exchange thing shows up on my doorstep in full “We are soulmates and in love and obviously this is how you feel too because you talk to me” mode, and…

Wow. Creepy as fuck. Don’t be that guy. Don’t ever be that guy. If you’re going to woo a woman, -woo- her. Don’t pretend to be a friend so she’ll think “Oh, how nice you are” and expect her panties to fall off as a result. Seduce or get off the pot. Otherwise, you’re doing the relationship equivalent of watching her through a window while breathing heavily.

And I assure you, from experience, if you’ve been acting like a friend and suddenly go full “I LOVE YOU!”, she’s going to feel like you were lying to her the whole time and want to just get away from the suddenly creepy stalker-tastic subtext then rip open your jeans then and there in gratefulness.

Actually, I once went through something fairly similar to this, right down to thinking this was a fairly selfish way to use up someone’s time, but going along with it because of my secret unstated desires.

Thank you, John Seavey. I have been involved in nerd culture (comics, gaming, scifi, fantasy, SCA) for over 35 years and it was extremely difficult to be female in said culture when I started. Sadly, and out of touch with the rest of the world, it didn’t get any better as the decades progressed. Which is surprising, considering how much the percentage of women surrounding me has skyrocketed lately, especially in the comic book segments of nerd culture.

So you have no idea how much it helps to read blog entries like MGK’s and yours and know that some guys actually get it.

I also have my doubts about all women calling up a nice guy at 3:00 in the morning. I’m a woman, and I can tell you that we might…MIGHT do that with a GIRL friend, if we are sufficiently close. Maybe. But every night for 3 months to a guy?

The logic behind the Nice Guy rants seems to be this: Women are supposed to find a boyfriend that fulfills all of their needs. All of them. But this example woman has divided her needs between two men. The boyfriend supplies the physical, while the Nice Guy provides the emotional support. According to Nice Guy logic, boyfriend is never gonna be able or willing to provide emotional support, but Nice Guy could provide the sex stuff, so why won’t she just buy all her groceries at one store instead of driving all around town?

As a recovering Nice Guy, I recognize the narcissism underlying this logic, the certainty that I can fulfill all of a girlfriend’s needs, so why does she want to go out with her girl friends instead of me tonight? Why won’t she tell me what she is thinking, even though I ask her all the time? Bitch.

My best friend, who is female (I’m not) has indeed called me up in the dead of night for help. But it’s for things like a dead car, please can I bring jumper cables, not just to trash (and I’ve had family members make the same request).
And there’s never been any question she’d do the same for me if I needed it(and she has).

Alas, the fucking godawful “light bulb” gibberish made it really hard to give a crap about whatever insightful points may have been made.
Also, does it really need to be said, yet again, that men who play the “Nice Guy” card are lacking in emotional maturity? zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

“The whole idea that a man and a woman can somehow have interactions between each other that don’t lead to sex is absurd on the face of it; relationships between members of the opposite sex can only have two phases. Courtship, and screwing.”

Is this serious? Am I not detecting the tongue-in-cheek? If you are serious…this is one of the stupidest, most ignorant comments I’ve ever seen on this site.

Friendship, real friendship, is based on different things than sexual attraction. Nothing drives me crazier than this idea that guys chase after women who are interested in comic books, video games, etc because they believe that the path to romantic fulfillment is based on shared interests.

It is not.

My wife and I like a few things in common. Quentin Tarantino, Community and Boardwalk Empire for example. But she’s not going to sit down with me and watch Liar Game, and I will tolerate something called Bad Girls Club being on in our bedroom while we’re in bed together because I like having her body close to mine. This is the basis for 13 years of successful marriage.

Now, I actually can’t imagine being in a non-romantic relationship with her, it’s been so long since I was single. I imagine if she were no longer with me it would be like losing a limb or having a stroke. However, if I were to honestly rank whether I prefer to discuss video games with my brother or listen to her cutely babble on about the latest Judge Mathis, I think that’s an easy choice. However, I respect my wife and I know that my pointless conversations about video games are not really better than her pointless conversations about reality TV. We just aren’t mental clones of each other. (By the way, I’m not trying to imply here that she’s dumb or anything like that. Lots of people like Judge Mathis. Did you know he’s been on the air since 1999? It’s a true fact! For more information about Judge Mathis consult your local Internet.)

Now, I have platonic female friends who like similar things to me. Early in the marriage she would make snide comments about them, and she was genuinely worried that we were more than friends. Nowadays she grudgingly tolerates them. It helps that they’ve moved far away from me so I don’t see them in person anymore.

My point? If a guy asks a girl out on a date, and she rejects him, there may not be a basis for a real friendship after that. It might not be a good idea for either party to pursue friendship, and we shouldn’t judge them if they decide to go their seperate ways.

It’s better than inventing a sham relationship in the hopes that she’ll “Choo Choo Choose You.”

This one comes up time and time again, in every one of these Nice Guy rants. Again, do women ever really do this? Ever?

In fairness to the Nice Guys (TM), I was on the receiving end of this kind of thing once, so they’re not hallucinating. A lot of details were different in ways that completely changed the meaning of things, but, fair enough, such unhealthy relationship dynamics do exist and aren’t completely fabricated by crazy misogynists. Here are some of the differences between my situation and the joke:

1. It wasn’t nightly for three months, certainly never after midnight. It was during the day or maybe in the evenings, in person more often than not, probably twice a week or less. It was well within the range of normal conversations between friends, if you’ll forgive the pedantic way of phrasing that.

2. The talks were rarely about her “current light bulb” and how she’s arguing just a bit too much with it. Much more often they were about her family, which wasn’t merely unsatisfying but downright abusive.

3. I’m 90 percent sure that until I was really up-front about my attraction to her, she was genuinely oblivious to it, and that after I finally came clean about it, she did her best not to lead me on while otherwise still being friends. Despite all the other problems, I think she handled that as well as she could.

4. I wasn’t in a position to have any “crucial business meeting” at the time, because we were in high school. Young, stupid, and lacking in experience and perspective. There are a ton of things I should have done differently during that period that I didn’t just because I didn’t know any better.

To summarize: if the details really are as bad as in the joke, well, that’s a problem all by itself. To treat Nice Guys (TM) like seem to think they’re the victims of, a woman would have to have very big psychological issues indeed, such that she has much bigger problems in her life than blue balls or whatever. And it takes only a minimal amount of maturity and self-awareness to avoid or fix this situation. So, OK, yes, such relationships do exist. Nice Guys (TM) can have a cookie. But what that actually means is nothing like what Nice Guys (TM) think it means.

I have had some platonic female friends,and I’ve NEVER yet figured out what “the real signs of “I am interested in you” ARE. NEVER. Ah well.

In no particular order, just some signs I’ve noticed:

* Invitations to do things together just the two of you rather than with a group.

* Compliments that seem to be unusually personal, heartfelt, or based on attraction of some kind.

* Being more touchy-feely physically.

Obviously, that’s not very helpful. Some people are more huggy than others, it’s hard to quantify “heartfelt”, etc. There are gray areas. Sorry that there’s no really easy answer. If you know a person well enough for this to matter, then hopefully you’ll know them well enough to know where to draw the lines in those gray areas for them. Maybe a lack of signs means that you’re not noticing them, but most likely though, it means that she’s not interested. Sorry.

Kidding, kidding, trying to be funny. I’ll probably never figure them out. A bit of bitterness from guys about women (and vice versa) is understandable, but you should try to get over it. Marinating in it and using it to shape your view of the opposite sex is not.

I think part of the problem is that for many (if not most) guys, there is no such thing as the “friend zone.”
A man can have a platonic best (or just) friends relationship with a woman for years, and if she suddenly confesses feelings or sexual designs on him, he’ll totally go for it (before you jump on this point, I’ll be clear; I am aware that that never happens).
See, because Nice Guys(TM) don’t really have empathy they cannot get around this. Because if the friend zone doesn’t exist for them, how can it exist at all?
Most guys learn to recognize “the friend zone” and avoid it (or simply never get near it by making their intentions clear IMMEDIATELY) with women they are attracted to, where as Nice Guys(TM) cannot develop this skill due to their….whatever-the-hell-you-would-call-their-problem.

if you’ve been acting like a friend and suddenly go full “I LOVE YOU!”

I think that’s where some of the problem originates – it’s easy to learn how to be friends, and it’s easy to learn how to be in love, because by and large most people handle each of these things similarly. Learning how to solicit romantic interest is insanely difficult by comparison; small wonder some people never bother.

I have had some platonic female friends,and I’ve NEVER yet figured out what “the real signs of “I am interested in you” ARE. NEVER. Ah well.

There’s no mystery. I assume your female friends speak English. A simple, “Hey, would you be interested in going out on a date sometime to see if our friendship could work on a different level?” should suffice.

If they are truly your friend but they are not interested they will decline, no harm, no foul. If they get all weird after your question then they were never really your friend and you are better off knowing that now.